Food Certification: A Bibliometric Analysis

Introduction

Nowadays, it is widely recognized that consumers ask for high quality food products and, therefore, agri‐food markets have changed dramatically in recent decades. The biggest challenges come from consumers’ concerns about health, food safety, animal welfare, environment protection, and biodiversity. It has been noticed that, as economies develop and incomes increase, consumers demand higher levels of safety and quality in the food they purchase (Smith and Riethmuller, 1999; Hobbs et al., 2002; Baltzer, 2004).

For responding to consumers’ requirements, food producers make efforts in the process of products’ certification, for providing higher food safety levels. Certification is the procedure by which the accredited inspection and certification bodies provide a written attestation showing that the agri-food products or their control systems comply with the methods used on the agri-food system chain, as defined by Constantin (2016). In order to carry out efficiently the certification process, the International Standard Organization has been established, organizing inside it a committee responsible for providing the necessary information, for developing guides and rules for different types of inspections, tests or certifications.

The concerns for food quality has led to a considerably grown number of accredited inspection and certification bodies and to a higher number of quality assurance schemes, recognized in three levels: international, regional (e.g. European Union) and national. The certification can be mandatory, when required by the legislative framework in some countries for certain fields, or voluntary, used by firms to add value to their products that become more appealing and seem more confident for consumers. Both products and processes may be certified as complying to standards. As regards the products’ certification, the reason why food producers are concerned to certify their products is that the certification acts like a signal for consumers that the product is safe and has good quality, and an opportunity for producers to differentiate themselves in the market (Jervell and Borgen, 2004). Pop (et al., 2018) found that certification serves to support organizations to demonstrate that they really apply the rules in the standards. As regards the processes’ certification, Militaru (et al., 2014) argued that the certification of a management system proofs that the organization performs superior quality processes over the rest of the competitors, improving continuously the quality to meet and even exceed consumer requirements. Barendsz (1998) observed that an increasing number of firms are striving for a certificate, to achieve both external benefits, as part of their marketing strategy, and internal benefits to open up a way to improvements and efficiency.

In the case of agricultural products, there are numerous certification schemes implemented in Romania, both mandatory and voluntary. Quality schemes certify the quality and characteristics of products or the production process for consumers. The Common Agricultural Policy provides measures to access European funds to promote agri-food products registered on quality schemes (Popa and Nica, 2021).

This paper has the objective to analysis the researchers’ interests in the topic of certified food products, emphasizing the role of certification in assuring food quality. The research question is How important is the food certification? In answering this question, a bibliometric analysis has been developed using international scientific data bases and specific applications for processing the data. We start our research from the hypothesis that food certification plays a central role for food safety and quality.

The results presented herein contribute to the literature on food certification and link this literature to the food quality, safety, marketing and food consumers’ behavior, choices, attitudes, perceptions, trust, willingness to pay literatures.

The paper is structured into five parts. After the introduction, the methodology is presented in section 2, then the results are presented in section 3 and discussed in section 4. Final conclusions are drawn in section 5.